“I don’t…” I trail off, not even able to form words. “You knew I was a clone and you never told me?” I feel divorced from the words as they come out of my mouth, like they’ve been spoken by an entirely different person altogether. Maybe they have; after all, they are Eden’s words, not Emma’s.

Levi nods, still slumping like the weight of the planet is pressing down on him. “It’s another reason I fell for you, you know. Besides the fact that you’re irreverent and brilliant and a total pain in my arse. Emma, if one minute element of your life had been different, if our guardian hadn’t sent you to replace the original Emma, we would have grown up together. Been on the exact same path. We would have understood each other the way the other Similars and I do.” He pauses for a beat to squint at the horizon, and I wonder what he’s looking for, but really, I’m too stunned to care. Finally, Levi turns to face me again. “Knowing that potential was inside you, but that you had lived, beyond the limited childhood we experienced. That you had the kind of life we never would… It made you the single most intriguing person on the planet to me.”

I hear what he’s saying, and in some corner of my mind, I’m processing it. Why he was so reluctant to be close to me last year, and yet, why he seemed to gravitate toward me, in his own way. It’s another wrinkle, another piece of the complex puzzle that I wasn’t privy to, but that makes complete sense. Levi knew you were one of them. It’s why he fell in love with you—and why he tried to push you away.

“The others didn’t know? Maude, Thea, Ansel, Jago? Pippa?” I whisper. I can’t bear the idea that they all kept this from me. “Why would Gravelle tell you and not them?”

“We all had training on the island,” he explains. “We studied our DNA families. Our originals,” he says, bitterness in his voice. “In my one-on-one sessions with my guardian, he told me about your history. He said it was important that I know, so I could understand Ollie, since the two of you were so close. At the time, I couldn’t fathom why I was learning this—any of it—but so little made sense to me then, I accepted it, like I accepted most everything he told me. Now I see that this was all part of Gravelle’s plan to torture us. To drive rifts between us and our originals, so that we’d eventually come back to him, convinced our DNA families would never love us. I think, somehow, Gravelle knew how I’d end up feeling about you.”